Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, 87, Dies; Dean of U.S. Catholic Historians

By BRUCE LAMBERT

Published: October 17, 1992

Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, a leading Roman Catholic historian whose criticism of the church's colleges and universities in the United States moved them to seek higher academic standards, died yesterday at Providence Hospital in Washington, his hometown. He was 87 years old.

He died of complications of a hip fracture, said a spokeswoman for the Catholic University of America, where he taught for many years.

Monsignor Ellis was considered the dean of historians of American Catholicism, but his influence extended far beyond his chosen discipline.

In 1955, in a speech and essay entitled "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life," he attacked the academic quality of Catholic seminaries, colleges and universities. In that criticism he asked why Catholic institutions failed to produce their share of Rhodes scholars, prominent scientists and other leaders. He placed blame for the shortcoming on what he saw as the church's insulation, which he said resulted from a "self-imposed ghetto mentality."

Some officials and educators of the church were offended; others took the assessment to heart. Two years later the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, a former president of the University of Notre Dame, credited Monsignor Ellis with upgrading scholarship on Catholic campuses across the country.

Monsignor Ellis often drew opposition from conservatives in the church.

In 1962 he warned of growing anti-clericism among American Catholics and said it was "imperative that the clergy be persuaded" to accept "a relaxing of some of the power and authority that they have been accustomed to exercise" and grant parishioners a more active role in church affairs.

He also called for greater acknowledgment of church transgressions like the Inquisition. "Nothing is gained by denying what is true," he said in 1964. "If we try to obstruct Catholic intellectuals, we obstruct the progress of our church."

Monsignor Ellis wrote more than a dozen books, including the two-volume "The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore," and many articles. He was a former managing editor of the Catholic Historical Review, a past president of the American Catholic Historical Association and the first Catholic to be president of the American Society of Church History.

Among his many awards were the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities' Hesburgh Award. Pope Pius XII named him a domestic prelate in 1955, and in 1989 Pope John Paul II made him a protonotary apostolic, the highest honor for a priest short of becoming a bishop.

He taught at Catholic University from 1938 to 1964 and from 1977 to 1989, and in between at the University of San Francisco. His early teaching career was spent at Saint Viator College in Bourbonnais, Ill., and at the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minn., where he was ordained in 1938.

He was born in Seneca, Ill. After graduating from Saint Viator in 1927, he earned a master's degree in 1928 and a doctorate in medieval church history in 1930 at Catholic University.